George Miller Wants to Make Two More ‘Mad Max’ Movies

The long and winding Fury Road, that leads to ... several more sequels.

There were bigger hits this summer, but the most acclaimed blockbuster of the season, bar none, was George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road. At least 15 years in the making, Miller’s return to the Mad Max-iverse for the first time since 1985’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome thrilled audiences and critics, introduced a new action heroine for the ages (Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa), and reestablished the series as the preeminent action franchise on the planet. But that doesn’t mean a whole lot if Miller, Theron, and Max himself Tom Hardy don’t carry that reputation forward into new sequels.

The whole Fury Road team have said before that they’re very amenable to continuing this post-apocalyptic saga into the, uh, post-post-apocalypse. And now Miller’s told Top Gear that, if all goes as planned, he’s actually going to make two more Mad Max adventures before all is said and done.

Miller explained that the development process for Fury Road took so long that they “ended up with two scripts, without really trying.” Now he and Warner Brothers have to decide which of those two scripts to make next. As Miller’s said publicly before, he intends to make a “small film without special effects” next, then return to Max’s world of fire and blood:

We shot Fury Road for eight months ... that’s a lot. Every day in the heat and the dust, doing these stunts, it’s very wearing. We’ve got two more planned, but at some point in the future.”

The three words to make you nervous there are “at some point.” It took Miller well over a decade to make Fury Road; the whole project nearly fell apart several times. And Miller’s no spring chicken either; he turned 70 last March. If the next sequel takes too long to get started, who knows what his health is going to be like in five or ten years. I hope he’s around and still kicking ass when he’s 90. But two more Mad Max films might not be realistic.